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The faux news article reproduced below is a masterful bit of political effluvium, one which proffers the shocking revelation that not only were the bulk of donations to Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign made via the Internet coming from a handful of wealthy financiers in China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other Middle Eastern countries (rather than from American voters), but that Senator Obama was fine with accepting such tainted and compromised funding because of the technicality that none of these donations violated campaign financing laws: Example: [Collected via e-mail, July 2008] The article was not, as claimed in its header, written by veteran political columnist Maureen Dowd (her 29 June 2008 column was about Senator Hillary Clinton's supporters, not the financing of Senator Obama's campaign), who said of it: And aside from the article's bogus attribution, the facts it posits about contributions to the Obama campaign are wrong: The bulk of the money raised by the Obama campaign via donations in 2008 came from contributions of $200 or larger, not contributions of $10 to $25 or so, and campaigns must, by federal law, identify all PACs and party committees that give them contributions, and they must identify individuals who give them more than $200 in an election cycle. A September 2012 report by the Government Accountability Institure has been touted by some as proving that the Obama campaign has been receiving illegal donations, but that report doesn't actually document any verifiable instances of illegal foreign donations to the Obama campaign. The report notes that both major-party candidates had issues with fraudulent Internet campaign donations in the 2008 election, and that in the 2012 election both major-party candidates' campaign literature has been circulated on foreign social media with links to pages through which donations can be made. The report observed that failure to utilize industry-standard security protections on campaign sites (particularly by the Obama campaign) has made candidates more vulnerable to receiving fraudulent and illegal foreign campaign donations. The report also cited the curious case of the Obama.com web site, which is not owned or managed by the Obama campaign, but which in September 2008 was purchased by a bundler with considerable business ties in China and in October 2010 was transferred to an anonymous registration. The report noted that foreign links to Obama.com have driven a good deal of foreign traffic to donation pages on the official Obama campaign web site, and that these links increase the probability that foreign nationals will try to donate to the Obama campaign, but the report did not cite any documented instances of illegal foreign campaign contributions being accepted through traffic from Obama.com.
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